I have a 40 hour Series 2. I also have a couple of extra 60-80 gb drives (all Maxtor) laying around and ordered the bracket and fan kit from weaknees. If you could please give me your opinion on the following:

- 1- What Drive to Use: How important is the brand drive? Do I really need a Maxtor Quickview, or will my old Maxtors laying around work ok for a second added drive?. The first (factory drive) is probably 2 years old.

- 2- Drive Prep: I have 4 pcs in the house; all run windows xp; for some reason 3 are on NFTS and one is FAT32. Do I need to do anything to the drive I plan to add? If I do, I assume I want to use the FAT32 machine? I read somewhere that merely booting to an xp machine screws you. Frankly, I'd like to pitch the FAT32 box and use its C drive as my second Tivo drive. The weaknees online instructions deal more with swapping pre-formatted drives and I'm sure there's some prep I need to do. I know squat about linux, so would popping for instant cake be a good idea?

I have a 40 hour Series 2. I also have a couple of extra 60-80 gb drives (all Maxtor) laying around and ordered the bracket and fan kit from weaknees. If you could please give me your opinion on the following:

- 1- What Drive to Use: How important is the brand drive? Do I really need a Maxtor Quickview, or will my old Maxtors laying around work ok for a second added drive?. The first (factory drive) is probably 2 years old.

- 2- Drive Prep: I have 4 pcs in the house; all run windows xp; for some reason 3 are on NFTS and one is FAT32. Do I need to do anything to the drive I plan to add? If I do, I assume I want to use the FAT32 machine? I read somewhere that merely booting to an xp machine screws you. Frankly, I'd like to pitch the FAT32 box and use its C drive as my second Tivo drive. The weaknees online instructions deal more with swapping pre-formatted drives and I'm sure there's some prep I need to do. I know squat about linux, so would popping for instant cake be a good idea?

Thanks.

If you follow the Hinsdale instructions carefully you don't really need to know Linux. You want to use the FAT32 system so you will have a location to create a backup image. The Linux shells can't write to NTFS and you really need to save a copy of the image for when one of your drives fails. Yes, you could use Instacake, it's up to you.

If you follow the Hinsdale instructions carefully you don't really need to know Linux. You want to use the FAT32 system so you will have a location to create a backup image. The Linux shells can't write to NTFS and you really need to save a copy of the image for when one of your drives fails. Yes, you could use Instacake, it's up to you.

Can I run instacake on a Pentium machine running XP? the PTV site implied I needed an x86 box; I've tossed all of mine.

x86 refers to an instruction set, originally developed for the 8086/8088 CPUs (the 8088 was used in the original IBM PCs and the 8086 was used in the Compaq Desktop). Every CPU since then, from the 80186 (which was used in a 3Com file server) through the 80286 (the IBM AT), the 80386 (the first 32 bit member of the family), the 80486, the Pentium, Pentium II, Pentium III and Pentium 4, have all shared a core instruction set (with lots of additions and extensions along the way). Even the Itanium supports the x86 instruction set.

During a TiVo upgrade you should never boot into Windows, so the version is irrelevant. The reason to use a FAT based system is so that you can mount the FAT drive under Linux, and write the backup to that drive. NTFS partitions can be mounted for read access under Linux, but mounting them for write access is unreliable.